I’m writing this from downtown Nashville, where I just wrapped up Day 1 of the Lead4Change Teacher Summit at the beautiful Hotel Noelle and VentureX Co-working space. It’s mid-April, the weather is gorgeous, and I’m feeling energized, seen, and hopeful. I want you to know why! In addition to sharing this blog post with details and images I created to visualize my notes from today, I also recorded a 6.5 minute video you can check out.
One of my new colleagues at Providence Day School in Charlotte, Kate Horvath, participated last year in the Lead4Change Fellows Program, a ten-month leadership journey. She came back from that experience genuinely transformed, and she encouraged me to apply for this two-day Teacher Summit. I’m so glad she did.
Lead4Change is the brainchild of David Novak, the co-founder and retired CEO of Yum! Brands, and it operates under the umbrella of his Lift a Life Foundation. The organization shares free, research-backed leadership curriculum used by more than 28,000 educators nationwide. (You just need to register for free on their website to get access to their curriculum.) Their stated mission is essentially two things: help students believe their life matters and that they can make a difference, and affirm that educators have the most important job in America. Today, the team said that out loud, and all of us as leadership summit participants felt it!
This summit is only in its second iteration. John Hamilton, who sifts through hundreds of teacher applications to select the participants, opened our day by telling our group of 20 teachers (from all over the country — public, private, Title I, every grade level and subject area) that there was “no catch” to this experience. The Novak Family Foundation simply believes teachers deserve to be poured into the same way they pour into students every day.
I’m the only teacher here from North Carolina.
Session 1: The Importance of Self-Discovery (with Koula Callahan)
The first formal session of the day was led by Koula Callahan and centered on a deceptively simple premise: before you can lead others well, you have to know yourself.
Koula framed the problem honestly. As educators, we’re constantly dealing with behavior challenges, administrative pressures, budget cuts, staff turnover, and the relentless pull of the urgent. All of that slowly erodes what she called our “margin” — a concept that immediately brought to mind Dr. Richard Swenson’s book Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives. Swenson defines margin as the space between our load and our limits. When that space disappears, we don’t respond well — to our students, our families, or ourselves.
Koula introduced the idea of a Resilience Bank Account (RBA) — a mental model for thinking about the small daily deposits we can make that keep us steady when circumstances get hard. She cited a Fast Company finding that 80% of employees report working in a toxic environment, and pointed to a podcast by Will Ahmed (CEO of Whoop) on wellness and meditation as one example of how leaders are thinking about this differently.
One line from the session stopped me cold: “When we don’t know ourselves, stress makes decisions for us. Urgency sets our priorities. Other people’s emotions dictate our responses.” That’s a diagnosis I’ve lived and experienced in multiple contexts over the years.
I also kept thinking about two other books that connect here: I learned about John Mark Comer’s The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, and remembered Carl Honoré’s In Praise of Slowness – which I read and reflected on back in May of 2007. The theme running through all of this is that the pace of modern teaching culture is, in many ways, working against us, and that the antidote isn’t just productivity hacks, it’s identity work.
Koula closed the session with a personal challenge: Make a list of small, concrete things you can do each day to deposit into your own RBA. My list included things like returning to a consistent meditation practice, intentional stretching, continuing my morning quiet time at prayasyougo.org, and getting serious about a 10pm bedtime. Small things. Compounding things.
Session 2: Looking Back (with John Hamilton)
John’s session pushed us to resist the urge to jump immediately into action mode and instead spend some time in reflection — specifically, looking back at where we’ve been and how we got here.
We completed a Lifeline Exercise — plotting the significant positive and negative events of our lives above and below a horizontal line, mapping out the arc from our earliest formative experiences to today. It was a powerful exercise in noticing patterns: what shaped you, what broke you, what you’ve survived, and what those experiences equipped you to give to others.
John structured the session around three clarifying questions: Who am I? What do I bring? How do I want to lead?
For the second question, I reflected on what I consistently bring to others. My own list: connecting ideas and relationships across disciplines, energy and positivity, humor, and — I hope — a genuine commitment to empowering others as independent learners. John framed all of those things not as our possessions, but as things we get to steward for others. That reframe matters.
For the third question — how I want to lead — I wrote out a list that felt as much like a personal manifesto as a leadership statement. Near the top: listen carefully before speaking, be a culture healer, not a culture warrior, and invest in people and relationships. That last one connects directly to the work I’ve been doing through Heal Our Culture and through my community work in Charlotte.
This is the rough version I created during the workshop using a Google Drawing document. There are a LOT of other details I could add here.
Session 3: Looking Forward (with Koula Callahan)
After lunch, Koula returned to guide us through the forward-looking work — the part that required us to actually articulate the life we want to be building.
She introduced the concept of cognitive dissonance as a tool: when we vividly picture a future we care about, we feel a kind of productive discomfort when we’re not moving toward it. That dissonance, used intentionally, can become a powerful source of motivation. “Where your mind goes, your energy follows.”
The centerpiece activity was a Quadrant Analysis — thinking through four dimensions of life: Health/Personal, Relationships, Career, and Dreams. For each quadrant, we answered three questions: What have I accomplished that I’m proud of? What do I want to create or experience? How do I want to show up in this area of my life?
I did my quadrant on a huge sticky note with a pen, the old-fashioned way. Here’s the original:
Over the past few weeks I’ve been experimenting with a workflow where I take hand-drawn sketchnotes like this one and use AI image generation tools to transform them into what I’ve started calling “AI sketchnotes” — illustrated infographics that preserve every idea from the original but render them in a rich, visual format. Here’s the AI-generated version of my quadrant:
One thing I noticed while filling out the Career quadrant was that I didn’t write much about school or “formal classroom teaching.” I did note that as a “repeated idea or theme.” It’s a fascinating piece of self-awareness the exercise surfaces — my sense of calling is bigger than my current job title, and I think that’s actually healthy. I LOVE the students and classes I’m able to teach now as a middle school media litearcy and STEM teacher…. but I recognize I’m also working outside the classroom to support values and goals which go beyond educational curriculum.
The session closed with what Koula called a “Log Line of Your Life” — borrowing the concept from screenwriters, who pitch a movie in a single sentence to producers. Your log line is your story summary. It’s also, she suggested, a filter: when opportunities or requests come your way, you can hold them up against your log line and ask, does this fit who I’m becoming?
I used Claude to help me synthesize all four quadrants into a log line, and here’s what we came up with together:
A storyteller and culture-healer, rooted in family and fighting for justice in his own backyard, races to build the body, the bonds, and the financial foundation he’ll need to one day stand at the pyramids — and know he earned every step of the journey.
Koula had us go further and visualize that log line. Here’s the AI sketchnote I created to represent mine:
The emotional core of that image — standing at the pyramids and knowing I earned it — captures something I want to keep in front of me every day.
Session 4: Stop, Start, Continue (with Koula Callahan)
The final session of the day asked us to make our intentions concrete with a classic reflection structure: identify at least one thing to stop, one thing to start, and one thing to continue.
Mine:
Stop: Going to bed late — and spending too much mental energy thinking about challenging people in my life.
Start: Creating a daily container for book writing. Every day. Even 15 minutes. The books I want to write have been on my heart for years, and this summit clarified for me that they won’t write themselves if I keep treating them like something I’ll get to someday.
Continue: Making dedicated time each week for family financial work — building the gameplan and tracking milestones together with Shelly.
One quote from Koula in this session that I wrote down immediately: “No is a complete sentence.” She also pointed us to a Mel Robbins podcast episode called “The Let Them Theory” as a resource for thinking about how to stop letting other people’s choices rob us of our own energy and focus.
A Few Broader Reflections
Before we headed out to dinner at Butcher & Bee here in Nashville for dinner together, I was thinking about something that gets said often but is rarely backed up with action: teachers are pivotal. Today, the Lead4Change team didn’t just say it — they invested real resources into making sure 20 teachers from around the country experienced it personally this week.
I want to shout out another organization that pours into teachers in a similar spirit: Steve Wolf’s Wild Heart Teacher retreat in Colorado. My friend Kevin Honeycutt is involved, and it fills up fast every summer. If you’re a teacher who needs that kind of deep renewal, look into it. This 2 minute video gives a short summary.
Dr. Richard Swenson’s definition of margin — the space between our load and our limits — keeps echoing in my mind as the theme of the day. This summit is, at its core, a margin-building experience. And it’s one of the most energizing I’ve had in a long time.
Day 2 is tomorrow. I can’t wait for the learning and the community building to continue!
If you’re an educator and you want to explore the free Lead4Change curriculum or learn more about their fellowship and summit programs, head over to lead4change.org. Passionate teachers who care about helping kids become the leaders our communities need — this one’s for you.
AI Attribution: I used Claude AI to draft this blog post using my notes, sketchnotes, and AI sketchnotes. I asked Claude to analyze at match the tone and style of my last 10 blog posts here, and I further edited and changed the blog post before sharing it.
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